The Siege of Hateful Contraries: Shelley, Mary Shelley,
Byron, and Paradise Lost

Stuart Curran

In Milton and the Line of Vision, ed. Joseph Anthony
Wittreich, Jr. (Wisconsin: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1975),
209-20

{209}

I dreamed that Milton's spirit rose, and took
From life's green tree his Uranian lute;
And from his touch sweet thunder flowed, and shook
All human things built in contempt of man . . .

-- Shelley

Few can pretend to the cheek of C. S. Lewis, who first told Milton's readers that none of
them knew what Paradise
Lost was about and then, with the primness of a Tory
vicar confident of taking tea with royalty in heaven, informed
his auditors that the lesson for the day was obedience.1 But without
his hauteur, one can feel as adamant in one's convictions
and press a thesis somewhat less primary, if equally less
erroneous. Simple and negative, it is likewise easier to
substantiate. Romantic Satanism, the pervasive heresy supposedly
celebrated by the younger Romantics, does not exist, but, like
the chimeras of Eve's dream,
continues to distemper the mind. On that occasion Milton assured
us that "Evil into the mind of God or man / May come or go" (V.117-18); but we may also
assume that it ought not to remain unquestioned for a century
and a half.

{210} To lift this burden from shoulders wearily accustomed to
bear it is not to deny that there are those who deserve to have
it to themselves. A succession of Milton's critics, with a
sophistical blindness to the text, placed a self-indulgent and
idiosyncratic taste above sober judgment and determined Milton
to be Satan's apologist.
For obscure reasons of cultural dynamics this line of argument
seems to have reached its most vociferous pitch around the time
of the Second World War, and the subsequent development of
criticism on Paradise Lost appears to have taken impetus
from the perceived necessity of refuting the Satanic view. With
professional standards of courtesy governing so much of academic
life, critics may be pardoned for displacing E. M. W. Tillyard
or A. J. A. Waldock in favor of Shelley and Byron, long dead and immured
within their scandalous reputations. A curious gentility it is,
however, that would make the younger Romantics scapegoats and
distort their views to accord with those of later commentators.
One finds Merritt Y. Hughes, whose scholarly judgment was
otherwise finely balanced, claiming that "Milton's Satan
deceives himself so well that he deceived Shelley into thinking
him a Promethean apostle
of human regeneration, and Byron into thinking him an inspiring
symbol of revolt against
political tyranny."2 Shelley, suggests John S.
Diekhoff, conceived of Satan "as a thoroughly admirable moral
agent," and Diekhoff dismisses the famous remarks on Paradise
Lost in A Defense of Poetry with blistering scorn:
"If this is eloquent, it is eloquent nonsense."3 The moral
archness of these comments serves to remind us that Romantic
Satanism has an exact source in literary history, a source that
might surprise later critics who lightly inherit the term:

Men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a
system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct,
have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society,
and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts
and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve, labour to
make others as miserable as themselves, by infecting them with a
moral virus that eats into the soul! The school which they have
{211} set up may properly be called the Satanic school; for
though their productions breathe the spirit of Belial in their
lascivious parts, and the spirit of Moloch in those loathsome
images of atrocities and horrors which they delight to
represent, they are more especially characterized by a Satanic
spirit of pride and audacious impiety, which still betrays the
wretched feeling of hopelessness wherewith it is allied.4

Robert Southey began this
diatribe in the third section of his preface to A Vision of
Judgement by suggesting that the laws be strengthened to
prohibit the publication and distribution of "those monstrous
combinations of horrors and mockery, lewdness and impiety," by
which he characterized the mature works of Byron and Shelley.5 Of course, it
is unjust to taint later attacks on Romantic Satanism with guilt
by association; but Southey's combination of humorless orthodoxy
and censorious repression must give one pause. His correct
assessment of the Satanic mentality is expressed within a
context utterly abhorrent to Milton. Had Milton been alive when
his conceptions were first invoked against the Satanists, one
would confidently predict him to have joined the devil's party
posthaste.

The moral of Southey's position should thus be observed. In
rejecting the simplistic tendencies of the Satanist critics,
readers of Milton have at times followed C. S. Lewis into the
equally simplistic pieties of Anglo-Catholicism. The
contemporary view of Paradise Lost, buttressed by
extensive theological scholarship and a close reading of textual
patterns, is more orthodox, one might submit, than ever before
in the history of the poem's reception. If the Satanists
commonly treated Milton as if he did not know how to express his
deep allegiances, the orthodox critics also tend to separate the
artist from the artifact, as if Paradise Lost were
another, sublime example of God's creation. But the Satanic
impulse did not leap forth as a fully formed perversion, like
Sin from the head of her creator, when the Bastille gates fell
and the ancient hierarchies toppled: it surfaces throughout the
poem itself, as Milton obviously intended it to do. If the
greatest artist of English verse wished to create a masterpiece
that never probed or questioned orthodox conceptions, he had the
certain capacity. {212} Instead of avoiding problems or tacitly
ignoring them, Milton goes out of his way to emphasize them. And
the central issue, claiming our attention from the first, may be
summarized in Sir Herbert Grierson's sardonic observation: "If
the third part of a school or college or nation broke into
rebellion we should be driven, or strongly disposed, to suspect
some mismanagement by the supreme powers."6 Such
suspicions Milton actively encourages, shrewdly understanding
that the surest means of creating epic dynamism out of a myth
where all the answers are known is to call those answers into
question, one by one. It is noteworthy that so many of the
commentaries on the poem set as their aim the gentle guiding of
the reader back to orthodoxy. If the untutored reader has been
seduced, it is not by Shelley and Byron, but by Milton. As
Shelley affirms in the Preface to Prometheus
Unbound, "the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered,
a republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion."7 Thus
conceived, he became the exemplar for the skeptical endeavors of
Shelley and Byron, and a classic antagonist to the hired
sanctimoniousness of poets laureate.

The bold inquiry of Paradise Lost, as Shelley reads the
poem, stems from distinctive ramifications of its largeness of
vision, which he analyzes in the famous passage in A Defense
of Poetry and recreates in several of his major poems. In
the Defense he celebrates Dante and Milton together:

The Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost have conferred upon modern
mythology a systematic form; and when change and time shall have
added one more superstition to the mass of those which have
arisen and decayed upon the earth, commentators will be
learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral
Europe, only not utterly forgotten because it will have been
stamped with the eternity of genius. (Prose, VII, 130)

That comment has an authentically Shelleyan ring to it, but it
is no mere reiteration of his pervasive irreligion. Rather, it
represents {213} the considered perspective from which he reads
Milton's epic: as comparable to the Homeric or Virgilian epics, a mythic
structure independent of the religious principles that inform
it. To Shelley Paradise Lost represents Christianity but
it does not inculcate it. If anything, Milton's objective
rendering of Christian myth draws attention to its inadequacies,
especially for a reader predisposed to emphasize them:

. . . Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical
refutation of that system, of which, by a strange and natural
antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing can
exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as
expressed in "Paradise Lost." It is a mistake to suppose that he
could ever have been intended for the popular personification of
evil. Implacable hate, patient cunning, and a sleepless
refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an
enemy, these things are evil; and, although venial in a slave,
are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much
that ennobles his defeat in one subdued, are marked by all that
dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral
being is as far superior to his God, as One who perseveres in
some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of
adversity and torture, is to One who in the cold security of
undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his
enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of
a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of
exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far
violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a
violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to
his God over his Devil. And this bold neglect of a direct moral
purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton's
genius. (Prose, VII, 129-30)

To assert that this passage "presents Satan as the great moral
agent" of Paradise Lost, or to remind us sarcastically
that "the purpose which he has conceived to be excellent" is
merely the destruction of the human race, is wholly to distort
Shelley's statement.8 Miltonist commentary on this
passage has invariably {214} seized upon isolated subordinate
clauses (for example, "although redeemed by much that ennobles
his defeat"), converting them into declarative and unmodified
assertions, or has rewritten two sharply circumscribed,
sequential constructions -- "as far superior to
. . . as One who perseveres" -- "has so far violated the popular
creed . . . as to have alleged" -- so that they appear
to be direct affirmations. In the main body of the passage there
is a single unconditional declaration around which all else
revolves: "these things are evil" (my italics). The
enveloping clauses seek to discriminate the fine gradations of
this evil, not to exonerate it. If a reader seeks a moral
representative, Shelley suggests, it is obvious that he will not
find one in Satan; and,
less apparent but equally clear, since God acts as Satan's antagonist
with superior hatred, cunning, and plotting, he self-evidently
suffers from the same defects. The only extenuation of Satan's
evil is that accorded a victim of greater evil. No moral
superiority can be claimed, however, because the antagonism of
Satan and God is itself not moral.9

Shelley would have welcomed the clarity of Lewis's memorable
utterance: "Many of those who say they dislike Milton's God only
mean that they dislike God."10 He would have assented without
feeling any need to follow Lewis into apologetics. For Shelley,
the Christian vision of Paradise Lost is a mythic
structure conceptually removed from questions of faith or
belief, a dynamic model whose universal tensions have been
accentuated by Milton. In his brief analysis Shelley ignores the
psychological validity of Milton's rendering of evil, though it
is clear from many of his writings -- and in particular the
direct confrontation of Christ and Satan in the rejected choral
prelude to Hellas -- that the poet was indebted to Milton
for his own comprehension of a reductive, self-consumed, and
self-consuming evil. The account focuses on Paradise Lost
as macrocosm, a mythological paradigm, as befits the emphasis of
{215} Shelley's original context, the unfinished essay "On the
Devil, and Devils," dating from a year and a half before the
Defense, the autumn of 1819. And in turn, the
context for that essay, flippant as it generally is, was
Shelley's serious, indeed obsessive, concern with the nature of
evil in the poems of this year.11 Shelley's conception of
Paradise Lost as mythological paradigm is scarcely
sketched in his critical paragraph. His principal statements on
Milton's model are not discursive but recreative. Although Prometheus Unbound and
The Cenci revert,
respectively, to classical and Renaissance literary patterns,
their essential dramatic conflict derives immediately from the
view of Paradise Lost contained in these remarks. In
The Cenci Shelley transposes the model into human
society, elaborating its necessarily tragic consequences. In
Prometheus Unbound he recreates it from an independent
mythological stance, balancing cosmic and microcosmic,
historical and psychological, perspectives, in order to expose,
explode, and replace the inherited model.

Count Cenci ends his extraordinary curse of his daughter and his
presence on the stage with an intimation of his largest
purposes:

O, multitudinous Hell, the fiends will shake
Thine arches with the laughter of their joy!
There shall be lamentation heard in Heaven
As o'er an angel fallen.

Cenci, conceiving himself a "scourge" (IV.i.63) wielded by God,
with characteristic megalomania identifies the divine purposes
as his own. His daughter's independence thus becomes a Satanic
revolt. "A rebel to her father and her God" (IV.i.90), Beatrice is to
be forced not merely to concede her will to Cenci, but
simultaneously to convict herself of irredeemable evil, to "Die
in despair, blaspheming" (IV.i.50), and thereby
ensure her damnation. Cenci the theologian is as ingenious as he
is insane, for he effectively leaves Beatrice without options.
To concede or not to concede her will to her father as
representative of God alike would {216} damn her. Beatrice's
view of her situation is the mirror-image of her father's in its
assumption that salvation can be secured only through becoming
God's representative. Thus her father's murder becomes the
fulfillment of providence. In confronting the agents of
society's justice, which in this play consistently echoes
Cenci's justice, she affirms that heaven has intervened because
they have "Bar[red] all access to retribution first" (IV.iv.118). Later, in
accepting the court's conviction, Beatrice transposes the guilt
to the logical and theological center from which emanates the
pattern she has been forced to retrace:

Or wilt thou rather tax high-judging God
That He permitted such an act as that
Which I have suffered, and which He beheld;
Made it unutterable, and took from it
All refuge, all revenge, all consequence,
But that which thou hast called my father's death?

Expelled from the center of her beliefs, the center of society's
ideals, Beatrice cannot return. Her fate is Satanic, as judged
by her father, by her culture, by herself.

Shelley's lengthy disquisition on the nature of Italian
Catholicism in the play's preface-as "interwoven with the whole
fabric of life . . . not a rule for moral conduct" --
deliberately propounds a cohesive religious structure like the
one he saw in Paradise Lost. It abrogates, rather than
enforces, morality. Both Cenci and Beatrice see themselves
allied with God's purposes; both also momentarily discover an
identity with Satan. What Shelley poses is not a riddle in which
his audience is to sort out the proper identifications,
assigning Cenci and Beatrice to their respective categories, but
a single dynamic model of which God and Satan are the
polarities. Defiant opposition is the motive force of the
personal relationship between father and daughter, and of the
society that encompasses {216} them. And yet, ironically, it
results from the compulsive assertion of power throughout the
social frame in order to compel unity to a single source of
power. Cenci conceives of his daughter as a "particle of my
divided being" (IV.i.117), and his
incestuous attack is an outrage of syllogistic precision
designed to "confound both night and day" (II.i.183) by
reassimilating his daughter to himself. Beatrice, in turn,
comprehends her body as an Eden now violated by Satanic
corruption, and in destroying the source -- which,
paradoxically, is also an assimilation of her father -- she will
extirpate the evil within. Cenci, however, holds the ironic
trump, a parody of God's capacity to frustrate Satan eternally
by transmuting his evil into good. Nothing Beatrice does can
free her from the consequences of her father's act. She is
effectively denied free will, as all acts become sins against
God, and non-action becomes the greatest sin of all. There is
only one means of liberation, in an agnostic rejection of this
model which enforces the whole society, but that is only
possible once Beatrice has accepted the inevitability of her
death and, beyond hope, draws her fellow-victims with her into
the dual intensifies of suffering and compassion.

The conceptual labyrinth of The Cenci, winding through
increasingly oxymoronic frustrations, like so many of Shelley's
complex structures, elaborates a simple truth: a model that is
fundamentally amoral cannot encompass and invest a moral
society. The pretensions of Prometheus Unbound are far
larger, for its theater is the cosmos and its purpose, like
Milton's, is justification. The scene opens upon "A Ravine of
Icy Rocks" (I.s.d.) high
above the earth, the barren setting for a deadlocked antagonism
that has endured for three thousand years, the span of
documented human history. "No change, no pause, no hope! Yet I
endure" (I.24). Shelley
has conflated the Dantean and Miltonic visions of hell: "Black,
wintry, dead, unmeasured" (I.21), replicating in an
exact sense Milton's prescription: "A Universe of death, which
God by curse / Created evil" (PL II.622-23). The
source of human misery has been a curse, a curse suddenly
recalled by Prometheus as he discovers the ethics realized by
Beatrice at the end of her tragic agony: "I wish no living thing
to suffer pain" (I.305), he asserts, as the
Phantasm of Jupiter retreats into subterranean darkness and dawn
begins to glow on the horizon. The curse repeated by the
Phantasm has no basis in Aeschylus or in the {218} Promethean myth, but from
first phrase -- "Fiend, I defy thee!" (I.262) -- to last --
"Scorn track thy lagging fall through boundless space and thee"
(I.301) -- derives from
Paradise Lost:

That Prometheus is cast in the role of Satan cursing Jupiter in
the role of Jehovah does not negate the relationship of
Shelley's poem to Milton's, but rather intensifies it. For the
curse repeated to Prometheus by the Phantasm of Jupiter -- who
reproduces the "gestures proud and cold / And looks of firm
defiance, and calm hate, / And . . . despair" (I.258-60) with which it
was originally uttered -- is the equal product of both, the seal
of their identity even as it establishes their antagonism. In
negating Satan for eternity God becomes a Satanic negation
himself. Self-justifying and self-righteous, the polarized terms
of the model are interchangeable.

Shelley's conceptual preoccupations seldom stand in isolation:
at least during his lifetime even the most obscure are
delineated more extensively and more openly in the writings of
his wife. Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus,
published six months before Shelley undertook Prometheus
Unbound, is the most pronounced imaginative recreation of
Paradise Lost in the Romantic period. Mary's derivations
are congruous with Shelley's later ones and would seem, like his
additions to the holograph, to indicate his marked influence on
her symbolic allegory.12 Although the {219} fiction is
ostensibly concerned with the creation of a new Adam, the issues recoil
continually toward the primal antagonism of God and Satan; and, as in Shelley's
dramas, the imagery is mutually implicative. The initial
allusion to the Miltonic context is an unexpected inversion, as
the narrator Walton observes that Victor Frankenstein "must have
been a noble creature in his better days" (p. 22). The analogy of
Frankenstein, the creator, with Satan grows insistent,
punctuated on the last page of each of the first two volumes,
which remark the mental inferno he bears with him (pp. 84, 145). But, of course, the
deformed monster who begins his existence, like Michelangelo's
Adam, by stretching out his hand to His creator, is immediately
transformed into "a thing such as even Dante could not have
conceived" (p. 53), and after
repeated rejection isolates his cold rage amid the icy Alps,
descending with superhuman power to walk by night and revenge
himself upon his maker. Frankenstein's pursuer through much of
his career, he becomes at last the pursued, even as, originally
Frankenstein's dependent creation, he later assumes divinity,
uttering the imperative verb that resounds through Milton's
epic: "You are my creator, but I am your master; -- obey!" (p. 165) Likewise, Frankenstein,
having created a monster, transforms himself into a monster: "My
abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived. When I thought of
him, I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently
wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly
bestowed" (p. 87).

A relationship conceived without love becomes predicated on the
intensity of hate. "I, too, can create desolation" (p. 139), the monster exults; and
revenge becomes the "devouring and only passion" (p. 198) for both. Unprotected in
the arctic wastes, Frankenstein testifies that "revenge kept me
alive" (p. 199), and when he
discerns the dog-sled of his adversary before him, he
experiences the ecstasies of a lover: "Oh! with what a burning
gush did hope revisit my heart! warm tears filled my eyes, which
I hastily wiped away, that they might not intercept the view I
had of the daemon" (p. 205).
Each denying the other a spouse, they commit themselves wholly
to the suicidal consummation of their relationship. It is the
monster who points to the frustration his creator cannot
articulate: "Whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my
own desires" (p. 219). The
murderous mirror-images {220} are like those of Francesco and
Beatrice Cenci; and the monster's plan for his suicide, a
spectacular immolation atop the north pole -- "I shall ascend my
funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the
torturing flames" (p. 221)
-- not only climaxes the inverted image patterns of this work
but becomes the prototype for Cenci's plan, once he has
destroyed his family, to make a pyre from his belongings, mount
it, and "resign" his soul "Into the hand of him who wielded it"
(IV.i.53-54). The
self-destructive nature of Satanic revenge both Shelley and Mary
saw in Milton. What they also conceived was that God's revenge
was equal in effect, as it was superior in design, and that the
creation resulting from such antipathy must be reductive.

The paradigm that the Shelleys abstract from Milton's epic is,
it hardly need be acknowledged, not the Christian vision one
expects Milton to propound. The tendencies of the model are
radically heretical. It fell to the least systematic or
philosophically learned of the three members of Southey's
"Satanic school" openly to avow the heretical implications, as
he redesigned the amoral antagonism of the model within the
Gnostic trappings of Cain. Although Byron was sensitive enough to the
laws on blasphemous libel to render his heretical notions within
a dramatic framework -- and, indeed, to have them stated by the
most traditionally unreliable of narrators, Lucifer -- there are
no events in the play to contradict the cosmic scheme in which
he instructs Cain. God exists in the isolation of his ennui,
tinkering with the universe, sitting

. . . in his vast and solitary throne--
Creating worlds, to make eternity
Less burthensome to his immense existence
And unparticipated solitude.

(Cain I.148-51)

He is "the Destroyer . . . The Maker -- Call him /
Which name thou wilt: he makes but to destroy" (I.265-67).
Omnipotent over the material universe, God is nonetheless
baffled by his inability to reconcile the claims of spirit with
those of matter. Lucifer, admitting their incompatibility,
indulges in the luxury of aristocratic disdain for the god who
must work, shielded through his incessant garrulousness from
confronting his own state as an equally "unpar- {221} ticipated
solitude," with nothing to do except frustrate Jehovah's
aspirations to create the perfect machine. Cain, inheritor of
that knowledge which is self-consciousness, is the incidental
victim of the irreconcilable polarities. Jehovah and Lucifer are
brothers who have separated, a pattern soon to be repeated by
Cain and Abel, and now contend for a single purpose: "To reign"
(II.ii.388). The power struggle is pointless; but then in this
ironic universe Jehovah's creation is also pointless, a mere
ego-extension, and Lucifer's vaunted liberty of thought reduces
to the spoiler's art.

The universal order is petty, if massive in its consequences for
man. Cain, the familiar Byronic hero caught between antitheses
he cannot control, in accepting his exile paradoxically commits
himself to a human destiny. "That which I am, I am" (III.i.509),
he maintains to the angel who marks his brow, thus acknowledging
himself and his progeny a third identity in the cosmos. Unlike
Jehovah and Lucifer, Cain is resigned to his limitations;
unlike them he is susceptible to the values of beauty and love,
which cannot redeem him but are distinctively human realities.
As a fugitive, Cain turns his back upon the struggles of Jehovah
and Lucifer, to which the Adamic family is still committed, and
sets forth to create a moral order. His is the solution of
Beatrice, of Prometheus, and of Robert Walton, the narrator who
mediates the nightmare vision of Frankenstein and returns
from the ice-locked arctic to the values of a civilized and
social life. The educational process of these works is alike in
its insistence on the inextricable unity of human faculties and
the absoluteness of human moral responsibility.

There are, of course, essential distinctions, ideological as
well as temperamental, among these authors and their works.
Byron never denies that man's nature is, like Napoleon's, "antithetically
mixed" (Childe Harold's PilgrimageIII.317), or, as Manfred
would have it, "half dust, half deity" (ManfredII.i.40). His solution is
existential, an acceptance of the absurdity inherent in a
consistent inconsistency, a compound so pure as to be itself
elemental. Shelley, at least in Prometheus Unbound,
denies that the duality is intrinsic to human nature,
discovering the source of evil not in society, but, beyond it,
in the structural models by which the mind organizes reality,
the patterns it imposes. Mary's romance stands somewhere between
these positions, its ambiguities largely {222} unresolved,
emphasizing human accountability and the reductive nature of
hatred. The most sympathetic treatment of the Satanic character
is that of The Cenci; but, notwithstanding Shelley's
effort to expunge from his heroine the ugly concomitants of
Satan's revenge, Beatrice's condition is unremittingly tragic.
The "restless and anatomizing casuistry" (Preface) by which one
defends her actions cannot alter the mode in which one is forced
to view her life. To bring the same attitude to Milton's Satan,
however, is to engage in a "pernicious casuistry," as Shelley
defines it in his Preface to Prometheus
Unbound, one that undermines the moral basis for judgment it
seeks to discover. Such casuistry demands that one accept the
context for Satan's rebellion, and it is that context which each
of these authors sees as pernicious. Paradise is incompatible
with a universe created through antagonism. Deadlocks issue in
death.

There is no little irony in the fact that the younger Romantics
went out of their way to show that the position with which they
are commonly associated, the Satanist view of Paradise
Lost, was indefensible. But a single paragraph of abstracted
principles, and a series of recreated works, cannot be called a
reasoned and systematic criticism of Milton's epic; and it
remains to be seen to what extent their view is a defensible
reading of the poem. Where so many erroneous opinions have been
attributed to the Romantics, one naturally hesitates to speak
for Shelley yet once again. But if we are sure of his premises,
or of his view of Milton's premises, our margin of error is
considerably reduced. At basis, Shelley would have vehemently
opposed any notion that only an orthodox Christian could rightly
appreciate Paradise Lost. Milton, like Dante, did not
write as a Christian, but as an epic poet.

He mingled as it were the elements of human nature as colours
upon a single pallet and arranged them in the composition of his
great picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is,
according to the laws of that principle by which a series of
actions of the external universe and of intelligent and ethical
beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding
generations of mankind. (Prose, VII, 130)

The Christian mythology was, for Milton as for Dante, "merely
the mask and mantle in which these great poets walk through
{223} eternity enveloped and disguised" (Prose, VII,
129). In turn, it clothes a conceptual drama whose principles
pertain to a human reality that will be judged by succeeding
generations independent of the vestment. This premise rejects as
specious any scheme that resolves the dramatic conflicts of the
poem by a circular reference to its enveloping mythology. God,
being "All in All" (PL, III.341; VI.732), cannot be wrong as
emanating center of a mythology; but the system then begs the
questions raised by his actions. Shelley, who was too masterful
a craftsman himself ever to propound that there were unconscious
impulses warring against the conscious intent of Paradise
Lost, suggests instead, and characteristically, that the
poem "contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that
system" of mythology it recreates.

A "philosophical refutation" implies a syllogistic series, the
terms of which Shelley would first find stressed in the second
book. "High on a Throne of Royal State" (II.1), Satan begins his eternal
parody of God and the persons of God: like the Son, he is "by
merit rais'd" (II.5). His
legions surround him, performing their automatic ritual:
"Towards him they bend / With awful reverence prone; and as a
God / Extoll him equal to the highest in Heav'n" (II.477-79). With "fixt mind /
And high disdain" (I.97-98),
Satan establishes the politics of hell "As being the contrary to
his high will / Whom we resist" (I.161-62), a reactionary
politics to the core. But then, an antithesis, even a parodic
one, reflects its thesis. The divine emblem that dominates the
heavens at the close of the epic's first third, the scale of
justice, may represent the Father's primal value, but in its
very bifurcation distinguishes a closed system of contraries.
The primal syllogism -- the spurned son turning upon his father
-- engenders its dependents. Sin leaps from the head of Satan,
but returns as mistress to her author. Death tears through Sin's
womb, but returns to gnaw her bowels as a grotesque extension of
Satan's revolt against the Father. And Sin recognizes the
prescribed limitations to Death's voracity as fulfilling the
repeated pattern: Death,

. . . me his Parent would full soon devour
For want of other prey, but that he knows
His end with mine involvd.

Satan purposes "To wreck on innocent frail man his loss / Of
that first Battel, and his flight to Hell" (IV.11-12); and in return man is
promised his revenge. Eve, contemplating suicide or
abstinence, is forestalled by Adam's persistent memory of God's
promise, imaged not as a liberating hope but as a vengeful
conclusion to the cycle:

that
thy Seed shall bruise
The Serpents head; piteous amends, unless
Be meant, whom I conjecture, our grand FoeSatan, who in the Serpent hath contriv'd
Against us this deceit: to crush his head
Would be revenge indeed; which will be lost
By death brought on our selves, or childless days
. . .

That perspective, one might argue, is irreparably fallen even as
it struggles to rise; but when Adam's prayer is answered with
effulgent grace, it produces only a more serene contemplation of
his just deserts:

Methought I saw him placable and mild,
Bending his care; perswasion in me grew
That I was heard with favour, peace returnd
Home to my Brest, and to my memorie
His promise, that thy Seed shall bruise our Foe.

The rhythms of a fragmented eternity become the cycles of
history in time, as Michael unveils the future of the race. Cain
kills Abel; Enoch is persecuted by his tribesmen, Noah alienates
himself to perfect his mountain labors; and providence deluges
the earth. Adam anticipates a peaceful aftermath, but the
postdiluvian tranquility is soon rent by the dispersal, and at
the beginning of {225} the twelfth book another Satanic
manifestation, in symmetrical balance with the first, arises "as
in despite of Heav'n" (XII.34), the Hunter Nimrod who
installs political tyranny on earth as Satan has in Hell:

And from Rebellion shall derive his name,
Though of Rebellion others he accuse.

So
shall the World goe on,
To good malignant, to bad men benigne,
Under her own waight groaning till the day
Appeer of respiration to the just,
And vengeance to the wicked, at return
Of him so lately promis'd to thy aid . . .

History cannot be redeemed except by being halted. Free will
cannot be justified except through its dislocation. The primal
syllogism contains all others: the initial separation into sheep
and goats presupposes the last judgment. This is what the
younger Romantics stress: the justice of God to Adam and Eve is secondary to the question
of his justice to Satan.
"The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious
casuistry, which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs
and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure."
Lewis scoffed at this assertion, countering with an Oxonian
sniff that Satan's wrong was that he did not know his betters.13 Oxford,
after consulting God's high purposes, taught Shelley much of
what he knew about expulsion: it included no means of redress
except forfeiture of one's will. The impulse to expel is the
flaw in God's scheme: it is the psychological premise for the
ensuing cycles of fragmentation and can only end as it began,
with an eternal bifurcation that abrogates free will. Although
one can presume to read in Satan's soliloquy on Mount Niphates
the possibility of a reconciliation (IV.79-81), no utterance of the
Father's supports it.

[Satan] breaks union, and that day
Cast out from God and blessed vision, falls {226}
Into utter darkness, deep ingulft, his place
Ordain'd without redemption, without end.

For God to have sat down for a chat with Satan, of course, would
presuppose a very different poem from the epic Milton wrote. It
also, from Shelley's point of view, would have produced a very
different universe from that depicted in the poem, one
compatible, as the antagonistic model is not, with Michael's
enunciation of a democratic politics and a humanist ethics at
the end:

It is no more accidental that Demogorgon's closing benediction is so
strongly reminiscent of Michael's than it is that Prometheus's
curse echoes Jehovah's. The two points of similarity cast in a
strong light the "philosophical refutation" Shelley saw in
Paradise Lost. There is no logical progression that can
unite that curse with that benediction. The polar opposition of
God and Satan is a Platonic
model for myriad extensions of the primary syllogism, but a
locked antagonism is amoral and incapable of progression.
Creation is set in motion, but no true dialectic can issue from
a circular prototype. As Satan reacts to God, God reacts to
Satan. Within that sealed context, free will is a conceptual
sophistry. As the political liberation Milton stresses
throughout the twelfth book is denied by the cycles of history
Michael anticipates, Milton's commitment to a Christian
eschaton suppresses his faith, and the equal faith of the
younger Romantics, in one that is human. In the largest sense a
humanist eschaton can be realized only through the
Charity that is the soul of all, which refuses to countenance
that Woe and Foe are the end rhymes of a closed couplet polished
by a divine hand. Love disintegrates oppositions, negations,
other- {227} ness. Hatred perpetuates a polarized universe and
frustrates the will to regeneration.

Shelley's celebration of Dante and Milton in A Defense of
Poetry culminates in one of his most memorable utterances:

A great poem is a fountain for ever overflowing with the waters
of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has
exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar
relations enable them to share, another and yet another
succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an
unforeseen and an unconceived delight. (Prose, VII. 131)

One can never ignore the "peculiar relations" the younger
generation of Romantics established with the literature and
culture of the past. They survived the intellectual terrors of a
quarter-century of war that devastated and impoverished Europe
within a pervasive metaphorical assumption. Napoleon pitting himself
against that amalgam known as the Holy Alliance was the Satanic
rebel defying the upholders of orthodoxy. The Napoleonic Wars
appeared to the sensitive minds of the age as a reality whose
imperatives were no less categorical for being fruitless, but
more so, enforced with historical urgency. To these writers --
and to the finest minds throughout Europe -- there was no public
position that was not reactionary, as the interchangeable
empires committed their citizenry to the ruthless mechanism of
an inherited paradigm. The deliberated refusals of Prometheus
and Cain are characteristic of a sober optimism that will no
longer abide by the standards of antagonism informing western
culture. Milton's genius for their creators was to have
discerned that model at the center of Christian thought, the
conceptual framework for modern culture. A man unable to sustain
his commitment to a corrupt church, a corrupt monarchy, or a
corrupt Commonwealth, Milton exemplified his own refusal in the
libertarian rhetoric of Book XII of Paradise Lost. If the
New Model Army of Cromwell
was only the old model refurbished, predicating its existence on
opposition, it was doomed to reenact the warfare of God and
Satan to no avail. The epic written by this spiritual fifth
columnist severely questions the order it reproduces, nowhere
more than in those examples of human charity and divine mercy
that transcend the rigorous claims of eternal justice. To the
younger Romantics, at {228} least, Paradise Lost is
neither a poem that justifies God nor a poem out of joint and
internally at odds, but rather an epic large enough in scope and
in intellect to stand beyond its culture and religion,
sustaining their philosophical tensions with honesty.

"Back to Shelley," William Empson adopted as his slogan, and,
returning with some ingenuousness and an exhilarating passion to
the vehement polemics of Queen Mab, he roundly
denounced the immoral who wrapped themselves in Milton's
respectability.14 "Back to Shelley," deliberately
echoes Harold Bloom in his Anxiety of Influence, though
he evidently means something else. After an opening
acknowledgment that Shelley conceived of all poets as
contributing to a single great poem, his back is ironically
turned on Shelley and on what Bloom agrees with Yeats is "the
most profound discourse upon poetry in the language," A
Defense of Poetry.15 The sad determinism and the
distortions to which Bloom's theory leads need not be rehearsed
or battled with, but his model deserves recognition. Milton
rules over English poetry with the omnipresence of his own
conception of God, and subsequent poets are forced into the
Satanic role, recoiling from the dominating paternity of his
heritage. It is the same primal syllogism, producing the same
hopeless, circular angst that the younger Romantics saw
in Milton's depiction of Christianity.

Back to Shelley. To the post-Enlightenment libertarianism of
that "most profound discourse upon poetry in the language." To a
conception of the artist as not one further, cynical extension
of the thrust of American competitive capitalism -- the
manipulator of a craft, beggared by the past, playing
beggar-thy-neighbor on the present, and threatening the future
with utter exhaustion of resources -- but as legislator of the
vision by which civilization frees itself from local obsessions
and selfish interests in order to forge a {229} community. To
the affirmation that art can liberate and that artists, rather
than being overwhelmed by the past, can be "the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present"
(Prose, VII, 140). To a joyful celebration of one's
mentors, honoring their independent integrity in the vigorous
assertion of one's own. To "that great poem, which all poets,
like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up
since the beginning of the world" (Prose, VII, 124).

The co-operating thoughts of one great mind. . . .
Back to Shelley.

A Defense of Poetry is an enduring testament to the
healthy, vital, and continual influence of Milton on the future
course of English poetry. It is written by a working poet, who,
after Blake, was probably the most strongly touched by the art
and exemplary life of John Milton.16 Although Shelley's skeptical
interpretation of Paradise Lost may not today gain a
great many scholarly adherents, it is important to emphasize
that it is not a compulsive misinterpretation of the poem. His
view of Paradise Lost can be supported from the text: it
can also be supported to some extent from what we know of the
development of Milton's political and theological positions.

What is most significant in Shelley's conception of Paradise
Lost, however, is not the precise view of the relationship
of God and Satan, but rather the attitude to the poem embodied
in that view. Modern emphasis on structural and rhetorical
repetitions has built up a work of art that is a monument of
form. There is something almost abstract and nonideological in
the purity of this multifaceted, enormous jewel, and it is
powerfully dazzling. Interpretations of Paradise Lost
written from such an aesthetic perspective have been among the
most influential and satisfying of those produced under the
impetus of the current Milton renascence. One thinks, for
instance, of Isabel Gamble MacCaffrey's examination of
Paradise Lost as "Myth" (1959), where the idea of
myth {230} appears as a pure distillate from the work of Jung,
and the poem attains a crystalline stasis of aesthetic clarity.
Paradise Lost asks for such a conception; so, one must
add, does Prometheus Unbound.

But A Defense of Poetry records an encounter, a myth that
is invigorating, unsettling, morally ambiguous. The cold jewel
of aesthetic perfection is for Shelley an enormous dynamo,
engaging the reader in moral casuistry, nagging questions,
complex and shifting balances. That, of course, is what Stanley
Fish has seen in Paradise Lost -- though with a vital
difference. Shelley is not surprised by his sin -- not even,
one would suppose, by his hamartia. The active engagement
of the reader with this massive work of art does not resolve
itself in orthodoxy. The epic does not restrict vision or slap
down with an authoritarian hand the very impulses it encourages.
Rather, it demands from its reader a maturity of moral response
within the large and open structure of its vision. Its implicit
assumption is that of the Areopagitica, that men are
educable within a free environment of ideas. As God has forced
responsibility upon Satan, and upon Adam and Eve, so Milton
makes his readers responsible to and for the entire Christian
vision he has remolded.

It is this free, dynamic relationship with his reader that has
made Milton so bountifully influential upon later poets and upon
generations of readers. Paradise Lost is, as Shelley
suggests, "a fountain for ever overflowing," casting its vision
not as a closed and finished record of the Christian cosmos, but
as a challenge of intellect and commitment. Shelley accepted
that challenge as the distinctive, indeed supreme, gift of a
Christian heritage he intellectually rejected; and if a later
generation disagrees with the ideological implications he draws
from Paradise Lost, it can only profit from his
contemplation of the dynamic tensions of the epic. In
Adonais Shelley places Milton, after Homer and Dante,
"third among the sons of light" (36). He is so honored as a
celebration of his art and influence, for as a poet, not as a
Christian, Milton extracted from the reigning mythology an
imaginative drama whose grand accents, though uttered on a
cosmic stage, are human and humane.

7. My text for the poems is Shelley: Poetical
Words, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford Univ. Press, 1905). For
the prose (cited in the text as Prose), I have used the
appropriate volumes of the Julian edition of Shelley, ed. Roger
Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vols. (London: Ernest Bonn; New
York: Charles Scribner, 1926-30). I have used the original
edition of Frankenstein, as edited by James Rieger
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974). And for Byron's Cain
I have used the standard text of Ernest Hartley Coleridge, ed.,
The Works of Lord Byron: Poetry, 7 vols. (London: John
Murray, 1898-1904).

8. Diekhoff, Milton's Paradise Lost, p.
31. It is true enough that in the Preface to Prometheus
Unbound Shelley refers to Satan as "the Hero of Paradise
Lost." That, of course, is the term Dryden popularized and a
commonplace even among those who, unlike Shelley, are unaware
that Satan is, indeed, heroic in a classical sense, and thus the
representative of a false moral code. Reactionaries of
Shelley's time use exactly the same expression: the
Quarterly Review, for instance, favorably compares
Southey's portrait of the Emperor Kehama to Satan, "the hero of
Paradise Lost" (9 [1811], 57).

9. Though generally I am in agreement with the
most balanced statement on this subject, that by Joseph
Wittreich ("The Satanism of Blake and Shelley Reconsidered,"
Studies in Philology, 65 [1968], 816-33), I would go
farther than his claim: "Satan in the poem is morally
superior to God in the poem. It does not follow, however,
that Satan is morally admirable" (p. 827). The paradox of
Shelley's series of comparative clauses is that they effectively
eradicate any moral premise that distinguishes between God and
Satan.

11. I have interpreted the poems of this year
as a skeptical revision of the Christian theodicies of Dante and
Milton in Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic
Vision (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1975).

12. Rieger assembles the evidence in the
preface to his edition. [In retrospect, such a logic dependent
on a reversed chronology is insupportable; it is more likely
that Mary Shelley started this train of literary association.
Ed.]

13. The quotation is the full statement in the
Preface to Prometheus Unbound. See Lewis, Preface
to Paradise Lost, p. 94.

14.Milton's God (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1961). Although ostensibly a Shelleyan reading of
Paradise Lost, Empson's arguments tend to exculpate
Satan, and to some extent he resurrects the view that the poem
is schizophrenic. Still, to lump him with Waldock, John Peter,
and other such critics whom Stanley E. Fish calls the
anti-Miltonians (Surprised by Sin: The Reader inParadise Lost [London and Melbourne: Macmillan; New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1967], p. 2) is a gross distortion.

16. Bloom distorts the entire Shelleyan canon
in order to see him as floundering in the wake of Wordsworth.
One might note, incidentally, that Shelley knew Bloom's
essential view of poetry, as well as his ideology, though
without modern psychological trappings. Indeed, as expressed by
Peacock in his deteriorationist Four Ages of Poetry, the
position is that against which Shelley wrote his discourse.